A Survival Guide
For Office Meetings:
Bring Your Own Toys

By

Jared Sandberg Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated May 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

Who says meetings are a colossal waste of time? Mai Wang uses them to catch up on thank-you notes from birthday and Christmas presents past. "I bring my calligraphy pen," says the 32-year-old consultant.

If there's food, Ms. Wang knows she can get up when a speaker is mid-monologue and snatch a muffin without drawing a glare. She doesn't hesitate to play with it either, she says, noting that one of her colleague uses meetings to hone his skills catching grapes in his mouth.

Civil engineer Val Mendonca is partial to drawing equilateral triangles during meetings. If he runs out of space, he goes "over it and over it again" -- kind of like the points other people are making. He also practices his foreign-language skills, writing notes about the meeting in Portuguese, for example, including, "He doesn't know what the hell he is talking about."

Lowell Gould, a beef-cattle geneticist, is blessed with a skylight in his conference room that enables him to meditate on the clouds rolling by. When "I'm staring up," he says, "others think I'm pondering the current subject." With his smart phone, he also sends e-mails on unrelated business subjects or writes letters. "Other people think you're just taking notes," he says. "But you're absolutely in another world."

For decades, meetings have been bemoaned as the lifeblood of bureaucratic windbags and proof of the triumph of process over productivity. Still, many employees manage to get a lot done in meetings, even if their accomplishments aren't exactly on the agenda.

"Perhaps the lowly meeting has taken on a new cultural importance -- one that allows us to actually get work done," says John E. Tropman, a University of Michigan organization-management professor who uses faculty meetings to grade papers. "We can pretend to work on corporate affairs while getting our own business under control."

Prof. Tropman, the author of several books on how to make meetings more efficient, estimates that "hundreds of billions" of dollars are lost each year to pointless meetings. But the costs of meetings are largely hidden in salaries and spread across budgets, he says. As a result, it's easier to cut employees than meetings.

It seems not much has really changed since early primate confabs. Today we tend to pick nits off people's backs less literally than those apes did, but there's still a lot of chest beating, grunting and mystified expressions. In fact, meetings have become so tainted that they now go by a host of other names. They're dubbed briefings (meetings that last longer than intended), seminars (expensive meetings with handouts), presentations (meetings preceded and followed by many other meetings), videoconferences (meetings with technical difficulties) and conference calls (meetings with eye-rolling).

Bernie DeKoven ran the Institute for Better Meetings for more than 15 years, but he folded it two years ago because it was hard to make money and he realized there was cultural resistance to improving meetings. He wanted them to be collaborative and fun, he says, but concedes, "I was naive."

Instead, Mr. DeKoven says, meetings are ceremonies to reinforce the hierarchy, to remind people who's boss, and to praise or chastise anyone who isn't. If people would just accept that that's their purpose, he adds, meetings could be shorter and cheaper. "But people cloud the issue by trying to get something done."

Not Anna Sowinksi's former boss. When she worked for an investment bank, one of the vice presidents arranged a global conference call among staffers in cities around the world even though "we really had nothing to do with the rest of these divisions," she says. Instead, the manager's self-promotion was masquerading as a team-building meeting, she says. On top of that, the meeting was held at 4:30 a.m. PST. Attendees "blankly stared at the speakerphone for 58 minutes after weakly greeting strangers in Hong Kong," she says.

To accomplish other things during meetings is the reason "God invented BlackBerrys" and other wireless e-mail devices, says a New York state official. He regularly gets into heated debates during meetings not with co-attendees but with his rowdy band of far-flung cousins in an effort to get to the bottom line of such important matters as: Who is the greatest quarterback ever?

Clearly, some meeting attendees could really use a meeting in which they're taught how to have a meeting. Which is what happened to people at the health-care association where Cathy Lincoln works. For reasons that included too much eye-rolling and note-passing, the association brought in a meeting coach. Tactics for improving meetings typically include writing up an agenda with time limits for each item, making people stand, inviting only those people who have to be there, and using a bell to gong ramblers.

Still, Ms. Lincoln doesn't have to look far to find people who give meetings their divided attention. Her own husband, who views meetings as auxiliary nap time, likes to write limericks during his more wakeful moments: "At this meeting, a fellow named Noyes/Glared ahead at the boys:/'The whole lot of you/Belong in the loo,'/He said with a great deal of poise."

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